Sewage Plant Expansion To Cost $1.1 Million Milford-trumbauersville Work Will Double Treatment Capacity

June 22, 1988|by CHUCK AYERS, The Morning Call

The Milford-Trumbauersville Water and Sewer Authority, which imposed a moratorium in April on allocating any further sewage capacity at its treatment plant, has placed the cost of doubling the plant's capacity at $1.1 million.

Bill Kee, authority engineer, said that in addition to doubling the plant's capacity to 800,000 gallons per day, the improvements will greatly expand sludge treatment capabilities and upgrade filtration.

The installation of a new biological treatment unit costing $350,000- $400,00 0, according to Kee's estimates, is at the heart of the project. The new treatment process unit willuse a biological process to remove phosphorous from the sewage, rather than chemicals which are currently used in the treatment process, he said.

Bids for that unit are expected to be let next spring, coinciding with the time the authority will again consider allocating additional sewage capacity, according to authority Chairman Thomas Courduff.

"The moratorium will be in effect until there's an invitation for bids to expand the plant," he said. By that time, he said, a construction time-line for the expansion is expected to be fully developed.

The new biological treatment tank, when on-line, will handle all the flow that is currently chemically treated, according to Kee.

One of the secondary treatment tanks will be renovated and placed back on line also as a biological treatment unit that will have double its current treatment capacity of 200,000 gallons per day.

The other secondary treatment tank will be converted to a sludge digestion system, Kee said, that will greatly expand the plant's sludge processing capabilities. In fact, Kee said, the 1.2 million gallon per day capacity will be in excess of what the facility will produce in the near future.

That, Kee said, would enable further expansion of the treatment plant without again having to upgrade the sludge digestion system.

Sludge digestion, Kee explained, is a process that treats the sludge produced at the plant, removes the odor and allows it to be applied to land for disposal.

The cost of converting the tank will be $70,000-$100,000 while the changeover of the existing secondary treatment tank to a biological tank will be about $300,000, according to Kee's estimates.

The last major change at the facility will be the addition of a filter, more or less a safety valve that prevents anything but clean effluent from being discharged from the plant.

That will cost about $200,000-$250,000, said the engineer.

Courduff stressed that the improvements would be implemented without raising the rates of existing customers of the sewage system.

"The expansion is going to be paid for by those new customers that are going to use it. It is our philosophy that it should not cost our ratepayers one additional penny for new development," he said.

The chairman pointed to the track record of the authority since it adopted that philosophy.

The only change in rates since the system was constructed in 1976 was a $12 increase needed to compensate for rising electric, insurance and sludge disposal costs, Courduff said.

That brought the annual average sewer bill to $200, he said.

The expansion will be paid for with the fees collected for connecting to the system. The cost to connect is $3,500 per equivalent dwelling unit (a theoretical measure of the amount of sewage created per home) and a $3,500 impact fee.